Don’t worry about the Celtics, worry about fake news
The difference between ballin’ and baloney
I’ve written a lot about the Celtics recently trying to analyze why they are struggling so much.
This article looked mostly at the team’s fundamental weaknesses and the psychological pressures that affect the young players’ performance. It also looked at the On/Off ratings of their All-Star veterans — Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward — that indicate they aren’t making the team better after the first 17 games of the season.
But asking the question “why?” misses a far deeper level of analysis.
It assumes the Celtics are in fact the odds-on favorite to win the Eastern Conference and actually have a chance to challenge the Warriors for an NBA title.
Today, I’m going to ask “why not?”
That question allows us to look at the factors no one wants to address: that the Celtics have been overachieving for a few years under Brad Stevens, and their play as a 9–8 team (following their 117–112 loss at Charlotte today) is more a case of the law of averages taking over.
First, let’s examine the fantasy world in which fans, blog boys and media talking heads have been living all off season. Here’s the narrative they’ve repeated endlessly:
“Boston got to game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals without their two All-Star players. LeBron James left the East open for the Celtics to take over. The young players will only get better. With the addition of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward, the Celtics are the most talented and deepest team in the East, and should give the Warriors everything they can handle in the NBA Finals.”
But there are four factors that completely contradict the assumptions in this narrative.
Assumption #1: LeBron James left the East open for the Celtics to take over.
Reality check: every other potentially elite team was also inspired to make the most of this opportunity and improve their team.
Beware the North: With LeBron James in the East, Toronto was the best or second best regular season team in the East every year for the last three years, but on the verge of disintegration because of their frustration in losing to the King every year.
If you combine team records from 2015 to this year, they are 14 games better than the Celtics, with almost no roster turnover… until this year, when they added two players with championship pedigrees in Kawhi Leonard, the #3 two-way player in the NBA, plus Danny Green, a big guard who can shoot and defend and who has played with Leonard for his entire career. In other words, Toronto’s offense and defense got upgraded AND their bench became deeper as one of last year’s starters gets moved down to the bench. (To me, the biggest evidence of Boston’s total break with reality was the failure to make an unbeatable offer for Kawhi Leonard. People were actually saying Tatum and Brown would eventually be better than Leonard, the only guy who has ever guarded and beaten Durant and LeBron in consecutive playoff series.)
Fear the Deer: While Boston fans cry about losing game 7 against LeBron James, they take their game 7 win against Milwaukee in the first round is a God given right. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Boston won game 1 of the series in overtime, while the Bucks blew an 18-point 3rd quarter lead to squeak out a 104–102 win in game 4. Over those 7 games, Milwaukee score one more point than Boston 713–712. That’s how close the series really was. And they had an interim coach.
This year, the Bucks added Mike Budenholzer, a real coach with a championship pedigree earned as an assistant under Greg Popovich. This guy won 60 games without a superstar in Atlanta. Do you think it’s possible he might be the first guy to figure out how to use Giannis Antetokounmpo correctly? Answer: the Bucks are 1/2 game behind Toronto for the #1 seed in the East.
The Process just got nasty: Even though Embiid and Simmons flamed out miserably in the post season, losing to the Celtics in 5 games, there is a huge difference between getting blown out in win totals and blowing big leads to lose games. Philadelphia blew a 22-point lead at Boston in game 2, choked badly in the last 1:05 seconds while up by 4 points in overtime in game 4, and blew a 4-point lead with 1:37 to go in game 5. And that included Robert Covington self destructing for the entire series, and the huge advantage Boston has in coaching. Guess who they added? Jimmy Butler, one of the nastiest two-way players in the league. He adds a level of toughness the 76ers never had, and possibly more than the Celtics possess.
Assumption #2: The young players will only get better
Reality check: regression to the mean politely disagrees.
This is the mathematical concept used in advance sports analysis that shows how any type of performance metric that involves an element of luck will swing back the other way.
In football, they talk about turnover differential as being one of those areas where a team will usually be much worse the season after they are outstanding. Obviously, when it comes to fumbles, the bounce of the ball plays a huge role in determining which team will recover them.
Now think about basketball. Isn’t it more difficult to make a 23-foot jump shot than a layup? And isn’t shooting long 3-point shots dependent on getting the “shooter’s bounce” off the rim on a few of those shots?
In a Bill Simmons podcast, Haralabos Voulgaris (now the Dallas Mavericks director of analytics), came up with the following stat:
In 2018, Jayson Tatum made the highest percentage of corner 3-pointers in the history of the NBA.
That’s amazing to consider. What does he do for an encore?
Is it really a surprise that Tatum is shooting “only” 38.7% on his 3-pointers this year. That’s the smallest regression of any of the other key Celtics.
Who else had huge jumps in their shooting percentages? Terry Rozier: .222 3P% in 2016 and .318 3P% in 2017, jumped to .381 3P% in 2018 on high volume. Currently shooting .339 3P%
Jaylen Brown: .341 3P% in 2017, jumped to .395 3P% in 2018. Currently shooting .273 3P%
Al Horford: .355 3P% in 2017. jumped to .429 3P% in 2018. Currently shooting .299 3P%
Marcus Smart: (okay, forget about Smart)
Nothing says that each of these players will follow career years with another career year. If anything, it’s likely that they could shoot worse for a number of reasons:
- The law of averages
- Feeling the pressure of new expectations
- Opposing teams will work harder to prevent wide open 3-point shots.
Assumption #3: With the addition of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward…
Reality check: Basketball is not an additive sport.
Only five guys can play at a time, and the combined skill of a deep team almost never surpasses the superior talent of a superstar with a bad bench.
Can you think of any team besides the 2004 Pistons that won a title without a dominant superstar? As I’ve written before, “Kyrie Irving can only play like LeBron James a handful of times throughout a season…”
Kyrie Irving had the best game of his career (even better than game 5 of the 2016 NBA Finals), with 43 points, 11 assists, and 69% shooting, and yet the Celtics were extremely fortunate to beat Toronto at home in overtime. Irving scored 17 consecutive points in the 4th quarter, and scored or assisted on all 16 Boston points in the overtime. In total, he scored or assisted on 33 of Boston’s last 37 points in the game.
But in a guard-centric league with freedom of movement, any guy with a hot hand shooting 3-pointers can be “LeBron for a night.” Case in point, Kemba Walker in Charlotte’s win over Boston, where he scored 43 points on 25 shots, hitting 7 of 13 three pointers.
Over the course of a season, there are only a handful of players who can dominate every single game they play, and find other ways to affect the game when their shot is off.
Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward do not fall in that category.
I know Kyrie Irving is a top 5 offensive talent in the NBA, but his defensive deficiencies don’t make the Celtics a better team when he’s on the court, unless he is on fire from the 3-point line. Currently, he has an On/Off rating of -7.0.
No matter how much fans want to believe that adding two All-Stars makes the Celtics a super team, the reality is neither guy will be the best player on the court when the Celtics play against Toronto, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Golden State, Houston, OKC, Portland, New Orleans, and even the Lakers (how that must hurt). You could have had Kawhi, but you just wouldn’t listen to reason.
Assumption #4: The Celtics are the most talented and deepest team in the East, and should give the Warriors everything they can handle in the NBA Finals.
Reality check: get ready to be the hunted, instead of the hunter.
When Hayward got hurt in the first game of the season, everyone figured the Celtics were toast. Other teams were fired up to play the Warriors and the Rockets. The Celtics were an after thought. Even during their 16-game win streak, the Celtics were barely beating the worst teams in the league, overcoming double-digit deficits against the Hawks and the Mavs. Nobody outside of Boston thought of the Celtics as an elite team. This year, they have been crowned the Easter Conference Champions and a threat to the Warriors.
Try living up to that hype as every bad team in the league will now treat Celtics games as their personal title game.
So far, the Celtics have barely beaten the Knicks, while Phoenix blew a 22-point lead and eventually lost in overtime. They also lost to two teams from last year’s lottery in Orlando and Charlotte.
Boston will have plenty to worry about if they start losing games to the Cavaliers.
Panicked reaction: the Celtics are a team in turmoil that won’t even get past the first round of the playoffs.
Reality check: the Celtics are fundamentally the same team as last year and they still have the best coach in the East.
Yes, the Celtics have the same weaknesses in rebounding as always, and they remain a jump shooting team that doesn’t score many easy points in the paint or on fast breaks. But guess what? Brad Stevens has adjusted the team’s pace, so they’ve jumped from #23 in transition points last year to #11 this year.
With Stevens’ coaching advantage, the Celtics will figure out their rotations. Gordon Hayward will probably become the most expensive role player in history. Kyrie Irving will have a much shorter leash if he’s scoring inefficiently.
Boston still plays in the Eastern Conference, and that just about guarantees a 50-win season. The reality is Boston will be no worse than a #4 seed. They still have an elite defense, so they will stick around in games against teams that have more talent.
Boston still have a chance to make a deep run in the playoffs, but they have the same razor thin margins of error they’ve had the past two years. But nothing says they can take the final step to pull off what would be the greatest Finals upset in history.
The Ringer’s Paolo Uggetti has analyzed Boston’s early struggles and is the first person to ask a question that no one has considered:
“We know Stevens knows how to coach an underdog and get the best out of a team that doesn’t have enough. But now Stevens has a new problem. Can he lead a team when the roster’s talent overwhelms, even mitigates, his coaching genius?”
Throughout NBA history, fans have always argued the merits of coaches who could develop young players (Doug Collins, Mark Jackson) versus coaches who could take stars and win championships (Phil Jackson, Steve Kerr) and how no coach has ever been successful in both scenarios.
Even if we accept the hypothesis that Boston actually has the talent to win a championship, is Stevens that unicorn of coaches who can be successful at every stage of a team’s evolution?